Frequentlyaskedquestions

Cloud computing and VPS servers have many advantages over In-House servers, but it must be looked at in terms of costs, maintenance, security and other variables. These products are housed in extremely secure data centres around the country. Clean, secure, data friendly same from damage, fire and untoward access. To provide these environments in-house is prohibitive and costly. You don’t pay for electricity when using a VPS or dedicated server, the costs are included in your monthly access fees. You don’t purchase equipment on a VPS server, you can upgrade resources within your monthly fees, budget and business requirements and this is done remotely by the administrator on a remote console. Need more space, memory, data capacity, users, merely login , increase the resources and the monthly fee is raised. Downgrade in the same way. It is difficult and costly if you wish to increase performance on an in-house server but VPS servers are configured in minutes. You pay for what you use.

The term Cloud or Cloud computing, contrary to belief is not something new. Since the day we were provided with Microsoft Hotmail it was available to the masses. Computing has evolved and now the BuzzWord "Cloud" is every where. Hotmail was one of the first email services to provide internet based email to the masses. It was not on your own computer but was on the internet and a connection made online to access the mail system. Its still is on the internet , so is mostly all of the worlds email servers, but now they call it the Cloud. If you have ever connected remotely to your business computer or server remotely from another location you have in fact used the internet as the medium to make that connection. The internet of today with its higher speeds, allows us to place that business computer / server anywhere in in the world and still make the connection and work remotely. You can place the computer anywhere or place yourself anywhere while on a business trip or holiday and still make the connection. We don't generally refer to this situation as Cloud, but place the server in a Data Centre, make a remote connection and Presto, like a shake of a wand, you have now entered the miraculous age of "Cloud" computing.

A VPS server or "Virtual Private Server is basically your server "Instance" on a shared hosted server normally in a Data Centre. It is referred to as Virtual because of the technology which allows it to co-exist within a much larger and powerful server. To yourself, the user it has makes no difference that you connect to a VPS, Dedicated server or your in-house office server to do your work. If you have ever connected using "Microsoft Remote Desktop" to do your work, you don't actually know whether or not you are using a VPS, Dedicated or In-house server. You would have to ask the question to find out the type of server you are using. Otherwise you would not have known.